Capital AudioFest Chronicles 2022
Musical mastery within the 3rd floor Meeting Rooms.
CAF 2022 Show Report By Rick Becker

Adams Room Tannoy
Tannoy Prestige Gold Reference speakers were holding court in the adjacent VPI Industries room here. Strangely, they were on large vibration-absorbing platforms as well as appearing to be raised on IsoTek footers. It looks like Audio Research monoblocks and preamp along with a piece of McIntosh kit.

The cabling was by Nordost. I remember hearing these speakers sounding much better driven by an all-McIntosh system at a Montreal show a few years ago.

Hallway  LTA Headphone Lounge
Doubling back to the hallway leading to more meeting rooms I stopped to take photos of the LTA Headphone Lounge which was fairly busy at this point. Audeze, Qobuz, and LTA had major presentations.

That's Douglas Ip from Stax at the left watching a table full of headphone geeks revel in an assortment of their fine electrostatic headphones. I met Douglas at the Toronto show a few weeks earlier. As I've shown, there were other headphone presentations in various rooms at the show, too. If headphones were your primary interest, you had to fan out across the entire show to see them all. The advantage of this setup in the hallway, as opposed to having a major headphone gallery in the Atrium, was that this space was relatively quiet. People were either sitting and listening or walking quietly through on their way to the meeting rooms.

The quandary of someone like Mytek just above, who had a single table with one headphone listening station is, how can they justify renting a large table in the hallway and how can they effectively man that station? Douglas Ip has the wonderful ability to maintain his serenity while being pinned down at his table for the entire show.

Wilson Room  The Voice That Is
The Voice That Is is a retailer in the suburbs of Philadelphia that is open by appointment only. They had a very fine room at the show that Greg Weaver ranked as his #2 choice for best of show. He obviously spent a great deal more time in this room so I'll link you over to read his comments and view the pricing here. 

Let me make a few additional points here. While the Tidal Audio Contros Digital Controller (seen on the middle shelf) can act as a preamp as Greg mentioned, it appears that it was feeding the Vinnie Rossi Brama Preamp in this rig. An important detail about the Brama Preamp is that it includes both 300B gain in Class A as well as solid-state gain. You can select one or the other for your listening pleasure. This is a trickle-down feature from the Brama Integrated Amp that was on silent display off to the side, shown below, in identical architecture, save for the information in the left dial and the connections on the back.

The integrated version puts out 350 Wpc into 4 Ohms and is stable down to 2 Ohms. This makes a formidable alternative to the Brama separates introduced here for someone who is more space constrained or financially conservative — without sacrificing the outstanding industrial design of these components.

In that same vein of price consciousness, while the Tidal Piano G3 speaker looks and sounds superb, the company also manufactures Vimberg speakers, a slightly lower-tier line with less bling that typically shows in the Canadian shows and Axpona.

On the bottom shelf was the Computer Audio Design Ground Control, a very high-tech approach to cleaning up the electricity to bring out micro-detail and spatial cues that elevate a great system to the upper echelon of what is possible today. This is a growing trend that has also been addressed by Synergistic Research, LessLoss Audio and likely a few more. These products go above and beyond the issues addressed by typical power conditioners and supplement them, rather than replace them.

This new Brama series is a very significant step upward for Vinnie Rossi. I tipped my beard to him on the way out and complimented him on the progress he has made over the years. It's great to see a new generation of cutting-edge designers coming along. It bodes well for the entire industry.

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